Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
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| Doctor Who character | |
|---|---|
 Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart |
|
| Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart | |
| Affiliated with | United Nations Intelligence Taskforce |
| Race | Human |
| Home planet | Earth |
| Home era | 20th century |
| First appearance | The Web of Fear |
| Last appearance | Battlefield |
| Portrayed by | Nicholas Courtney |
Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart is a fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, played by Nicholas Courtney. He worked for UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), an international organisation that defends the Earth from alien threats. He was one of UNIT's founders and head of British operations, and generally referred to simply as the Brigadier or "the Brig".
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[edit] Fictional character history
Lethbridge-Stewart first appeared in the Patrick Troughton Season 5 serial The Web of Fear (1968). Some accounts state that he was a Colonel in the Scots Guards (although in reality, the highest regimental rank would have been Lieutenant Colonel, and the regimental badge that most closely resembled Lethbridge-Stewart's cap badge in The Web of Fear is that of the Lowland Brigade). By his next appearance in the Season 6 serial The Invasion (1968), he had been promoted to Brigadier and was working with UNIT. When the Third Doctor was exiled to Earth, Lethbridge-Stewart gave him a position as UNIT's scientific advisor. Other military members of UNIT included Captain Mike Yates and Sergeant Benton.
In his initial appearances, Lethbridge-Stewart was portrayed as a stereotypical by-the-book martinet. Very often, the Doctor felt frustrated at working with him because the Brigadier's typical response to any threat was to shoot at it; a well-known phrase of his was, "Five rounds, rapid." In turn, Lethbridge-Stewart was sceptical of the strange phenomena and super science the Doctor habitually encountered, and just as frustrated with the Doctor's eccentricities. However, over the years the two developed a close working and personal relationship as well as mutual respect for each other's abilities.
The Brigadier always faced the unknown with unflappable British aplomb. He has shown himself to be a true warrior in combat, ruthless when he has to be, and heroic in the face of the often overwhelming odds that he and UNIT faced over the years. He eventually retired from the military to teach mathematics at a British public school in 1976, as seen in Mawdryn Undead (1983).
Most of the stories of the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who were set on Earth and heavily feature UNIT and the Brigadier. While not as ubiquitous in the following years, he appeared alongside every subsequent Doctor in the original television series run except the Sixth Doctor. They finally met in the charity special Dimensions in Time and the Big Finish audio play, The Spectre of Lanyon Moor. (The Sixth Doctor also meets the Brigadier in the novel Business Unusual, also purporting to be the first meeting of the two characters.) The Brigadier has also appeared with the 1996 Doctor Who television movie's Eighth Doctor in the audio plays. However, he did not appear with the Ninth Doctor in the 2005 series, nor are there any known plans to have the Brigadier appear with the Tenth Doctor, with Courtney's advanced age making any such appearance doubtful.
As one of the most popular supporting characters in the television series, the Brigadier is often considered a companion of the Doctor and indeed is listed as one on the BBC website's list. However, he does not fulfil the traditional companion's role of accompanying the Doctor on his travels.
Lethbridge-Stewart's last television appearance was in 1989, in the Sylvester McCoy Season 26 serial Battlefield. Called out of retirement to deal with an other-dimensional invasion of armoured knights led by Morgaine, he found himself once again at the Doctor's side. Lethbridge-Stewart served as his world's champion as he faced down and killed the demonic Destroyer of Worlds armed only with his service revolver and a load of silver-tipped bullets.
Little was shown of Lethbridge-Stewart's life outside UNIT in the television series, although Planet of the Spiders revealed he was in a relationship with a woman called Doris. It was Courtney's own belief[citation needed] that the Brigadier was married, and that he and Doris were having an affair. If so, Lethbridge-Stewart left his first wife because he was seen in Battlefield to be retired and married to Doris (played by Angela Douglas).
Lethbridge-Stewart's ultimate fate has yet to be confirmed, however in Battlefield the Seventh Doctor said that he was "supposed" to die in bed. In a comic in Doctor Who Magazine Lethbridge Stewart made a reappearence along side the Tenth Doctor after being kidnapped by Warlords as a tactical commander. He was an old officer stationed at Sandhurst.
[edit] Other appearances
The Brigadier and his family have made several appearances in the spin-off media. The spin-off UNIT videos Downtime and Dæmos Rising feature Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, the Brigadier's daughter from his marriage to his first wife, Fiona (first named in the Missing Adventure The Scales of Injustice by Gary Russell). Also appearing was Kate's young son, Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart.
The novels also gave Lethbridge-Stewart another offspring. While on duty in Sierra Leone as a young lieutenant, Lethbridge-Stewart met and was intimate with a local girl named Mariatu, the daughter of a village chief, and unknown to Lethbridge-Stewart, she had a son. This was first hinted at in Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of his 1988 serial Remembrance of the Daleks, which featured quotes from a fictional history of UNIT (The Zen Military) written by a Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (Mariatu's granddaughter) in 2006. In the 1992 New Adventures novel Transit (also by Aaronovitch, and set in the 22nd Century), the Seventh Doctor meets the adopted daughter of General Yembe Lethbridge-Stewart, one of Mariatu's descendants. This daughter, also named Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, went on to become a recurring character in the New Adventures.
The novels have also fleshed out the Brigadier's ancestry, establishing that he comes from a long-standing military family. In the New Adventures novel The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, he talks about three ancestors who reached the rank of General. One, William Lethbridge-Stewart, was in the retinue of James VI of Scotland and I of England. The other two fought at Naseby and Waterloo. The Scales of Injustice names the latter as Major-General Fergus Lethbridge-Stewart. The Brigadier also says in The Dying Days that his father died in World War II, fighting alongside Field-Marshal Montgomery in Africa.
The Past Doctor Adventures novel The Wages of Sin by David A. McIntee established that the Brigadier had an ancestor named Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart who worked for the British Government in 1916. Deadly Reunion by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts establishes that the Brigadier was a Second Lieutenant serving in Army Intelligence in 1944, although this makes the Brigadier older than other stories would suggest.
In the novels, Lethbridge-Stewart emerged from retirement again during the events of The Dying Days where he dealt with an invasion of Ice Warriors from Mars in 1997. At the end of that novel he was promoted to General. Lethbridge-Stewart was subsequently rejuvenated with alien technology in Happy Endings by Paul Cornell, taking place in 2010. The rejuvenated Lethbridge-Stewart, widowed as a result of an accident at sea but back with the military, next appeared in the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Shadows of Avalon, also by Cornell, where he still held the rank of General but preferred to be called "the Brigadier". According to The King of Terror by Keith Topping, Lethbridge-Stewart eventually passes away in the early 2050s.
Courtney played the Brigadier in two BBC Radio 4 Doctor Who plays set during the Third Doctor's era, The Paradise of Death (1993) and The Ghosts of N-Space (1996), alongside Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. For Big Finish, he has played the part of Lethbridge-Stewart in several plays, with Minuet in Hell revealing that he played a role in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament. He also played an alternate universe version of the Brigadier in the Doctor Who Unbound play Sympathy for the Devil, opposite David Warner as the Doctor and David Tennant (later cast as the Tenth Doctor) as Colonel Brimmecombe-Wood. A sequel to Sympathy for the Devil, titled The Dark Palace, was announced to be released in November 2005, but has been postponed.
Courtney also voiced the Brigadier in the 2001 webcast Death Comes to Time.
In December 2004, Big Finish released the first of a series of UNIT-based audio plays, where General Sir Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart acted as a consultant to a new generation of officers and by series' end became UNIT's new Scientific Advisor. As this version of Lethbridge-Stewart does not seem to be rejuvenated, these plays would seem to take place between the events of The Dying Days and Happy Endings. Also, the public does not believe in existence of aliens, which places it before the events of The Christmas Invasion. It should be noted, however, that the continuities of the audio plays and other tie-in media may not match up, and their canonicity is debatable.
[edit] List of appearances
[edit] Television
- Season 5
- Season 6
- Season 7
- Season 8
- Season 9
- Season 10
- Season 11
- Season 12
- Season 13
- Season 20
- 20th anniversary special
- Season 26
- 30th anniversary special
[edit] Video
- Downtime (novelised by scriptwriter Marc Platt as part of the Virgin Missing Adventures line)
[edit] Audio dramas
- BBC Radio
- The Paradise of Death (novelised by scriptwriter Barry Letts as part of the Target Books novelisation line)
- The Ghosts of N-Space (novelised by scriptwriter Barry Letts as part of the Virgin Missing Adventures line)
- Big Finish Productions
- The Spectre of Lanyon Moor
- Minuet in Hell
- Zagreus (the TARDIS creates a holographic projection in the form of the Brigadier)
- Sympathy for the Devil (Doctor Who Unbound series, out of normal Doctor Who continuity)
- UNIT: The Coup
- UNIT: Time Heals
- UNIT: The Wasting
- The Blue Tooth (adventure related by the character Liz Shaw)
- BBCi webcast
[edit] Novels
- Harry Sullivan's War by Ian Marter
- Blood Heat by Jim Mortimore (parallel universe version of the Brigadier)
- No Future by Paul Cornell
- Happy Endings by Paul Cornell
- The Dying Days by Lance Parkin
- Dancing the Code by Paul Leonard
- The Eye of the Giant by Christopher Bulis
- The Scales of Injustice by Gary Russell
- Uncategorized novel
- The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks
- The Shadows of Avalon by Paul Cornell
- The Devil Goblins from Neptune by Martin Day and Keith Topping
- The Face of the Enemy by David A. McIntee
- Deep Blue by Mark Morris
- Last of the Gaderene by Mark Gatiss
- Verdigris by Paul Magrs
- The King of Terror by Keith Topping
- Rags by Mick Lewis
- The Shadow in the Glass by Justin Richards and Stephen Cole
- Deadly Reunion by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts
- Island of Death by Barry Letts
[edit] Short stories
- "The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back" by Vanessa Bishop (Decalog)
- "Where the Heart Is" by Andy Lane (Decalog 2:Lost Property)
- "UNITed We Fall" by Keith R.A. DeCandido (Decalog 3: Consequences)
- "Freedom" by Steve Lyons (Short Trips)
- "Degrees of Truth" by David A. McIntee (Short Trips audio book, read by Nicholas Courtney)
- "Honest Living" by Jason Loborik (More Short Trips)
- "Still Lives" by Ian Potter (Short Trips: Zodiac)
- "The Switching" by Simon Guerrier (Short Trips: Zodiac)
- "Hidden Talent" by Andrew Spokes (Short Trips: Companions)
- "An Overture Too Early" by Simon Guerrier (Short Trips: The Muses)
- "UNIT Christmas Parties: First Christmas" by Nick Wallace (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
- "UNIT Christmas Parties: Christmas Truce" by Terrance Dicks (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
- "UNIT Christmas Parties: Ships That Pass" by Karen Dunn (Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
[edit] Comics
- "The Man in the Ion Mask" by Dan Abnett and Brian Williamson (Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special 1991)
- "Change of Mind" by Kate Orman and Barrie Mitchell (Doctor Who Magazine 221–223)
- "Target Practice" by Gareth Roberts and Adrian Salmon (Doctor Who Magazine 234)
- "Final Genesis" by Warwick Gray and Colin Andrew (Doctor Who Magazine 203: cameo appearance in parallel universe)
- "Mark of Mandragora" by Dan Abnett (Doctor Who Magazine 167-172: has a small role as most of the UNIT leader's role is carried out by Muriel Frost)
- "The Warkeeper's Crown" by Alan Barnes (Doctor Who Magazine 378–380)
[edit] References outside of Doctor Who
The character also appears briefly in a cameo role at the end of writer Paul Cornell's novelisation of the 1997 ITV science-fiction serial The Uninvited. Although the character is not named in the book, the description is that of Lethbridge-Stewart and Cornell later admitted that this was indeed his intention.
Marvel Comics' Excalibur featured an organisation called W.H.O. (the Weird Happenings Organisation) run by a Brigadier Alysande Stuart. Her twin brother Alistair was WHO's "scientific advisor" (the role the Doctor had in UNIT). The Brigadier himself had earlier appeared in two panels of an issue of Uncanny X-Men, leading a military action against the Juggernaut in Edinburgh (and referencing the presence of Major Benton).
The Sherlock Holmes novel Waters of Death by Kell Richards features a naval commander called Ralph Lethbridge-Stewart, alongside Captain Harry Sullivan and Lieutenant Philip Benton. It is set in the same fictional location as the Doctor Who story Terror of the Zygons.
A character who looks and acts very similar to Lethbridge-Stewart appears in the comic strip Caballistics, Inc. leading a group of special forces, who occasionally refers to "bloody robot yetis". This character is one of several references to the Doctor Who universe in Caballistics.
Although unnamed, two characters strongly resembling Lethbridge-Stewart and Sergeant Benton (who was specifically named) appear in the John M. Ford Star Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet? at a rather treacherous golf course on the planet Direidi.
[edit] See also
- United Nations Intelligence Taskforce
- UNIT dating controversy
- List of Doctor Who supporting characters
